From a $6.90 newsletter to $3M API: How a non-coder built Memelord | Jason Levin

Jason Levin is the CEO and founder of Memelord, an AI-powered meme creation platform that helps brands and individuals create contextual, trending memes. He started Memelord as a $6.90-per-month newsletter sending subscribers to a Google Slides deck, grew it to $100K ARR on Bubble without hiring engineers, then raised $3M to build it into an API-first product. What you’ll learn: How Jason grew Memelord from a $6.90/month newsletter to $100K ARR without writing a single line of codeWhy “no UX is the best UX” and how agents are becoming Memelord’s primary usersThe mandatory vibe-coding rule for his marketing team and how it unlocks unprecedented creativityWhy free tools are the new PDF downloads and how they’ve generated hundreds of thousands of emailsJason’s hardware hacking projects, including a bedside keyboard that creates Linear tickets without waking his wifeWhy AI can be funny (but humans are still funnier) and which model is the funniestThe philosophy of building hyper-personalized software just for yourself— Brought to you by: WorkOS https://workos.com/?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025—Make your app enterprise-ready today Persona https://withpersona.com/lp/howiai—Trusted identity verification for any use case — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Jason Levin and Memelord (04:28) Demo: Agentic meme creation with OpenClaw (06:55) “No UX is the best UX”—building for an agent-first future (08:35) How Memelord started as a $6.90 newsletter with Google Slides (12:35) Building to $100K ARR on Bubble with 395 workflows (15:20) Demo: Free tools section that generates hundreds of thousands of emails (17:59) Why Cursor is perfect for non-technical founders (20:20) Let your marketers cook—or watch them leave (24:19) Commit graph that shows the vibe-coding inflection point (25:25) Tools: Claude, Gemini, Linear, PostHog (28:19) Build weird stuff in the real world (33:24) Creative AI use cases (39:56) Using OpenClaw for calendar analysis (43:37) Can AI be funny? Which model is funniest? (45:26) Memes are not slop (46:45) What Jason doesn’t use AI for (48:12) Final thoughts — Blog & detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: How I AI: Jason Levin’s Workflows for Agentic Memes, Vibe Coding, and Hardware Hacking: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/jason-levins-workflows-for-agentic-memes-vibe-coding-and-hardware-hacking ↳ Build a Custom Bedside Keyboard for Idea Capture with Raspberry Pi and ChatGPT: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/build-a-custom-bedside-keyboard-for-idea-capture-with-raspberry-pi-and-chatgpt ↳ Build Free Marketing Tools as Lead Magnets Using AI Code Assistants: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/build-free-marketing-tools-as-lead-magnets-using-ai-code-assistants ↳ Automate Meme Marketing with an AI Agent and OpenClaw: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/automate-meme-marketing-with-an-ai-agent-and-openclaw — Tools referenced: • Memelord API: https://memelord.com/api • Cursor: https://cursor.com/ • Bubble: https://bubble.io/ • OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai https://openclaw.ai/ • Claude: https://claude.ai/ • ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ • Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ • Grok: https://grok.x.ai/ • Linear: https://linear.app/ • PostHog: https://posthog.com/ • Zapier: https://zapier.com/ — Other references: • Diego Zaks—“The best UX is no UX”: https://x.com/diegozaks/status/1966526522136649980 • Sam Lessin: https://wlessin.com/ • “Stop giving me advice”: https://stopgivingmeadvice.com https://stopgivingmeadvice.com/ • Memelord free tools: https://memelord.com/tools — Where to find Jason Levin: Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamjasonlevin Instagram: https://instagram.com/iamjasonlevin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamjasonlevin/ Memelord: https://memelord.com https://memelord.com/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Confession, I'm not a vibe coder. I'm way worse. So I started Meme Lord about four months before vibe coding started hitting.

• 0:07Claire Vo?

  You are an example of a company and a product that's going to get an inflection point because agents are going to become your users. Because agents don't get in their mind about being funny or not funny. They don't overthink. They just go straight to the tokens and YOLO something out.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  I just built it on Bubble. And I grew it to 100K ARR on Bubble without hiring engineers, 395 workflows just on the editor. And I was able to grow this just out of pure obsession and a love of it. I can't code and never have and can publish a skill that other people can download and just plug into their sentient lobster that makes weird memes.

• 0:45Claire Vo?

  What it unlocks, which you've shown us, give your marketers free rein on your marketing site to build the things that will drive demand. It's so lossy to take an idea and hand it off and hand it off and hand it off. And when you can just go straight to the code, you get better products.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Let your marketers cook. You have no idea what they're capable of. Either let them cook and let them market their stuff, or watch them leave your company.

• 1:13Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Voe, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today's episode is probably the most unhinged episode of How AI We've Done Yet with Jason Levin, CEO and founder of Meme Lord, who's asking us all to take being funny a little bit more seriously. We don't cover three workflows. I think we cover 10. And there are ideas all over this episode about how you can use AI to market, how you can use AI to build, and how you can use AI to capture your good ideas without waking up your wife at night. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools

• 1:54Claire Vo?

  are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chat bot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch? It's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features, so your app can become enterprise-ready

• 2:38Claire Vo?

  and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Jason, welcome to How I AI.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm super stoked to be here.

• 3:04Claire Vo?

  You and I met because when I was deep in my open claw psychosis, you messaged me and you said, I think I have the open claw use case for you. And you were right. I recently published this like ultimate guide to open claw. And Lenny was asking me, what are your like killer use cases for open claw? And I was like, man, I got an agent making me memes all day. And that is what you told me to do. So tell me, how did we get here? Why are we making like agentially driven memes via API in Telegram? Thanks to the bot father. You know, like, how do we get here in the year of 2026?

• 3:48Speaker 00

  The world is just getting more entertaining. I think that's really the thesis that drove me to start Memelord. And how can you make your brand more entertaining? Your content is the question, right? There's, you know, a great Elon quote of the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. And I don't think enough people take that seriously. It's like, if you want your brand to be the most likely outcome, shouldn't it be the most entertaining, right? So that's like how we got here, right? In a thesis-driven ways. Who controls the memes? Controls the universe, another Elon quote. And, you know, memes are the smallest form of cultural transmission, right? That's from the inventor of the word meme. So like, that's how we got started.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  But how did we get here is, you know, now Memelord has an API and you could plug that. Into OpenClaw for agentic memeing. And so what does this actually look like? I mean, you can see right here, can you cook me up a meme about memetic warfare? Right? And what it does is it uses our trending meme database, finds ones that are related, writes jokes on top of it. And here, right? It's not just some random meme. It's actually Bill Clinton, right? Because it's talking about political content, right? Here, making a meme about Iran, like, this is fantastic. Everybody knows the timeline goes nuts. Everybody becomes an expert. And one of my favorite features is just switch the caption, right? And so everybody is freaking out right now. Claude is destroying shareholder value, destroying startups with one feature launch.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  And I think there's a lot of founders that feel like that. So, you know, at the end of the day, like, the idea here is our internet is going crazy and gonna have fun. And let's have the most fun and do it agentically. I have a lot more thoughts I could share of how we got here, so.

• 5:33Claire Vo?

  Yeah, what I like about this is, just as the end user, and again, we don't usually show demos, except this is truly like my number one OpenClaw use case on the marketing side, which is, I do think you're right. This is like a new form of marketing that's quite effective for brands. If we're being incredibly boring about it and not cultural critics, we're just being good old capitalists. This is a very effective form of attention getting, and it's a very effective form of marketing. And, one, it's super hard to stay on top of trending news. And, two, it's super hard to stay on top of trending memes. And, three, you have a very narrow window. And so even as a human user of Mean Lord, I really felt like I couldn't stay on top of stuff.

• 6:18Claire Vo?

  And so what I actually think is the more interesting conversation for folks on how AI is, you are an example of a company and a product that's going to get an inflection point because agents are going to become your users. Because agents don't get in their mind about being funny or not funny. They don't overthink, they just. Go straight to the tokens and YOLO something out. And I think working with an agent as a user, especially in marketing, just like reduces the friction across so many, like it helps you climb cringe mountain in a way that's very hard to do as a human.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's this quote from the CTO for AMP that has been one of our leading points, which is no UX is the best UX. And we worked really hard on our UX and made it beautiful, while knowing the entire time that no UX is the best UX. And I think that everybody should try to do the same, you know? Thanks to you, I really appreciate it as well. Lenny tweeted, "We have the best onboarding on the internet." The amount of blood, sweat and tears that went into that redesigns, the bouncing logos, you know, trying it multiple times, changing the design of it, you know, where the different logos bounce, everything. So many redesigns and so much fun. I wrote a great article called iOS App Learnings Part One,

• 7:39Speaker 00

  just about the craft of it, while knowing the entire time that agents were coming and no UX is the best UX. And a story I've been meaning to share, I was on the phone with our lead investor, Sam Lessin, this guy wrote us a check for one and a half million dollars and tells me, "I don't really want to use your software anymore. It's nothing personal, I just don't want to use anybody's software." And I was like, "Thanks asshole." Well, good news, here's our API. It's now out and you know, the team is using it in their open claw, right? And that's just like the future that we're going in is like, nobody wants to press buttons anymore, even if they're beautiful. And I think you're right, we are hitting this inflection point. And seeing agents use it has been crazy and weird and magical.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  And that's, that's the power of Meme Lord is we, you know, help you find all the weirdest trends and, and all the newest trends. That's what we were built on is, is actually meme alerts, right? I started Meme Lord and we could get into this. I started just as a newsletter for $6.90 per month, sending you the newest memes. And then I sent you to a Google Slides deck, uh, cause I didn't know how to code. And that's really, you know, the evolution of Meme Lord was from that. And it's the same thesis of you just want to be on the current trends and remix them for your brand. So it's, you know, the future, no UX is the best UX and. You know, good news for Sam over here is he could use it from any agent now.

• 9:08Claire Vo?

  I feel like everybody's in a DM with Sam if you're building something in AI. What I would, what is it, thing is really interesting about what you said is you've combined some two interesting things that I think the AI product builders who watch how AI should pay attention to, which is one, a really good human onboarding experience and actually like very human marketing, which is at the core of what you do.

• 9:32Claire Vo?

  It's like, there's like identity alignment and a specific brand and a voice and a point of view. And so as a human, you get on board, but like as soon as I hit the API key, I'm out. And I think we're moving to this point where the full product experience is getting to a point where you can get an API key. You paste it in an environment file and you move on with your life. And so it's going to be really interesting to see, is that onboarding going to continue to have a human aspect to it? Can we figure out a gent at commerce so that agents can do that? And then the other thing that I think is really interesting about what you all have built is you package the API with skills.

• 10:12Claire Vo?

  So when you messaged me, you were like, get an API key, use the skills, you don't have to say too much and you're ready to go. And you know what, for product managers and designers who have been trained for years and years and years on building beautiful UX and where does the button go and what's the call to action? And now you're like, nope, literally describe to a sentient lobster how to use this API and like how to be fun. And that's a product. And I think that is super fascinating from a product skills development perspective. How was it writing that skill?

• 10:49Speaker 00

  It's exactly what you said. I was texting my engineers. I was like, how do I do this? Like, do I need your help? They're like, I don't know either. I was like, wait, why don't I just ask the lobster? I was like, yo, how do I make a skill? And it's like, I'll just do it for you, bro. I'm like, cool. Like, go for it. And then I'm like, oh, this looks great. Just publish it. It's like, cool. And I'm like, wow, I didn't even need to bug my. CTO, why am I paying him? No, just, I love him. But you know, it's, this is the world we're living in where me, who I can't code and never have, and you know, can, can publish a skill that other people can download and just plug into their sentient lobster that makes weird memes. Like, it's a very strange world.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  And I'm thinking a lot about how do I build something agents want? And how do I make that as frictionless as possible? Because you're absolutely right. It's like, we worked super hard on this beautiful onboarding and our marketing is superhuman. And that has always been our thing is like, relate to people. And like memes and humor is like how you show you're human in a world full of slop, right? And, and the personal connections and throwing weird events and hanging out IRL and buying your customers coffee. Like, the old skills that like, people have laughed at for years are more important than ever. Making somebody laugh, right? But at the same time, let me sell the agents, right? Because there's a lot of money there and because the internet's going that way, right? So it's, we're trying to constantly hit that balance.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  And I think at the end of the day, like, the world is getting more K-shaped and, and bell curved or barbelled, where everything's getting crazier and more extreme in different ways. And that's just another thing is you have to be extremely, extremely human and extremely good at selling to agents at the same time. It's a very strange time to be alive.

• 12:35Claire Vo?

  Well, and it's a strange time to be a builder. And I want to go back to something that you said earlier, which is, you know, your MVP for this was a newsletter.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:45Claire Vo?

  Six bucks, like Google Sheets. I'm telling you, like, my MVP of ChatPRT was like, a GPT on the ChatGPT chat store. It's still number three writing GPT. I have not, sorry, guys, I have not touched this thing in two years at least. I did a dollar a month. I was like, just a dollar a month. And the speed at which you can go from like, really scrappy, kind of cobbled together, no-code-ish MVP, maybe even a couple of years ago, to now like, full press app as a non-technical founder, which I think you are, is kind of incredible. So talk to us through your journey of building and how, how you actually build MemeLorn?

• 13:28Claire Vo?

  And what are some of your tips and tricks and workflows?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  So confession, I'm not a vibe coder. I'm way worse. So I started Meme Lord about four months before vibe coding like started hitting, right? And you know, Bold and Loveable were like just coming out, but they were so bad that you couldn't do anything. And so I was like, I'm not waiting. Like, what am I gonna do? Just wait until like these sentient AI models are good? So I just built it on Bubble and I grew it to 100K ARR on Bubble without hiring engineers. This is what it looked like, guys. So like, you have no idea just the amount of workflows. Like, like, it would be easier to like, figure out Atlantis than like, look at like 395 workflows just on the editor, right?

• 14:15Speaker 00

  And, you know, I was able to grow this just out of pure obsession and like a love of it. And, um, you know, there's me drinking coffee, like, we got rate limited the second day because there were so many signups and I didn't even know what rate limiting meant. And now I have an API company where people sign up for API. Like, that's very weird. But yeah, so we, we raised the money and then I hired engineers. And now like our main flow is Cursor. You know, we, we have, I find Cursor to be very easy to use. It's not perfect, obviously, but like, you know, everything we do is, is just generally on Cursor. You know, I, I talk to it. I, I, I love the, the Ask feature here. And then just like turning on the Asian and letting it cook.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  And what this has really done is like, I let the engineers handle the hard stuff, the security stuff. For the most part, except for when I'm feeling a little risky at 1:00 AM and drank too much coffee. And wanna like, you know, try vibe coding some off stuff, but don't, don't do that. And so what that lets me do and my entire marketing team, so I have a rule in Meme Lord that every marketer has to vibe code. And so what does this create is weird stuff. So let me just show you here is we have a free tools section. It's just meme lord.com backslash tools. These are completely free and they are lead magnets for the business. And we just come up with weird stuff and these have gotten us literal hundreds of thousands of.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Emails all around the world. We were actually going viral in Turkey of all places for this filter. Because some kid in Turkey made a TikTok about our bust down filter. That makes you, you know, have this filter, right? Like hundreds of thousands of emails from these dumb little tools that we just vibe code. Like I, we don't have a process. We're just like, oh, I need this tool. Like, I really need a GigaChat meme maker. Like, I don't know, I had this idea. I love this like design and I've always loved it since I was a kid and like, you know, here's my dog. Like, I just like built this one day because it was like, I just, I think like, it's like, I just want to see what I can do, right?

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Like, that's what's so exciting about vibe coding now is like, you could just do so much more and have so much more fun. I mean, last night I was building, oh, this one, oh, this is my favorite. So this is a Steve Jobs portrait generator. And anytime that I'm in like an article, like with journalists or like pitching to journalists or whatever, had my VA doing that. And now it's just open call doing that. But I have them submit this and now I've had this headshot in multiple articles. All from this dumb tool, right? Like, is my Steve Jobs one? So like, I don't know, I think, I think it just lets you have so much more fun. Like, I rebuilt this Snapchat filter that just lets you make a Snapchat caption because I was so pissed off.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  If you open Snapchat to try to like edit a photo now, it's like 50 ads and like, like a lot of like NSFW content trying to like advertise to you, right? And it's like, I just want to add the funny little Snapchat like caption to make it mean. Like, I don't know, I think like, this is how we operate. We operate on cursor and a lot of like, you know, linear stuff for that. But generally, we just love to make weird stuff. And that's like, that's what ties our team together is we are just weird internet kids that, you know, for me personally, like, I love just making physical art. I've always been making art. I've always been a writer. I've had stuff in galleries and won essay contests and like vibe coding is just like another way to express myself

• 17:48Speaker 00

  and make money on the internet and have fun. So I would encourage. urge people to like follow their phone first before anything else because that's how I ended up here is just silly weird hacking.

• 17:59Claire Vo?

  I I love this and for folks that are maybe not watching and want the kind of like higher level takeaway from this, which I think is very important. Which is one cursor is actually really good for non-technical folks and the reason why I think it's good for non-technical folks is you start to read the code and you start to learn a little bit more and you become more dangerous. And so I think sometimes when you're in these like terminal based Claude codes, they're they're great. They can, you know, spit off a lot of work. But I still I love a cursor because you can see what you're doing and I think that's really powerful. And I think the modes of ask, plan, debug, these are really good guided paths for things. And I think ask is a great one for maybe a non-technical

• 18:42Claire Vo?

  CEO who's working with a team of engineers and you're just like, remind me how the Steve, you know, you built it, but like, remind me how this works. Explain to me how this works and then you can go in and work on it. And those mechanisms are really good. I think the second thing which I love that you said, which is like, everybody vibe codes. Let me repeat it again for the people in the back, like everybody vibe codes and it's not this sort of abstract CEO kind of like tops down edict that you see in these large companies. What it unlocks, which you've shown us on this free bay, which I just, I love it so much. Is you can be like, give your marketers free rein on your marketing site to build the things that will drive demand.

• 19:27Claire Vo?

  And like, how painful would it be for your engineers to switch from like API rate limiting and off to trying to build sort of like these free meme generators and like translate the the like the creativity, right? It's so, it's so, it's so lossy to take an idea and hand it off and hand it off and hand it off. And when you can just go straight to the code, you get better products. And even though this is sort of like a marketing site, they're all little just baby products.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, they are and they drive subscriptions at the end of the day. I it's really weird because like two years ago, I wrote an article for HubSpot actually called Free Tools Are The New PDF Downloads Essentially, Right? And I was like, just like, working for other startups at the time and I just followed our exact strategy and it's working two years later. And I would recommend any startup, like, there's no excuse anymore. Why do you have a PDF download? Build a tool. It takes actually less time to build a tool nowadays. And nothing wrong with PDF downloads, obviously, you know, we do that occasionally, but it's very easy to just build a tool now and think about what weird tools they are and then put them at the bottom of your site where people can, you know, try out different tools and

• 20:43Speaker 00

  weird galleries and even games. We've started screwing around making mini games like, you know, these, these are now just as easy to do as, as write an ebook, which was, you know, if you're trying to collect more leads or emails for your newsletter, your business, et cetera, there's nothing better than building a mini tool that solves the first problem that gets people into the bigger problem that your actual company solves. So it's, it's just a common strategy there and, and really I'd encourage any, you know, technical person, let your marketers cook. You have no idea like what they're capable of and, you know, obviously I'm biased here, but the last company I was at, they didn't let me cook and that's why I quit.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  And then I raised money and built my own company and you're going to see a lot of that. And I think a lot of marketers and non-technical people are in a, in a revenge mode right now and they want to cook. So either let them cook and let them market their stuff or watch them leave your company.

• 21:43Claire Vo?

  I could not, I could not agree more. And again, like CEOs, CTOs, like C whatevers, all my, all my friends and peers at companies, like your most talented people will leave if you do not let them run. And that means like pay for the tokens. It also means let them build stuff. And I think what's, what I love about this moment with AI is like the word prioritize just goes out the door, like the. The priority is yes. We take an abundance mindset to what we can what we can ship. And you know, you look at this and can you imagine in some some other organization? I know you can't like somebody even proposes the idea of free tools and it gets whittled down to the most like milquetoast.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  I mean, look at this right here. We'll probably go broke from the AI credits, but at least we helped you make some bangers along the way. Right? It's like, I mean, Google gave us $300,000 worth of credits, honestly. So like, we're good for right now, but we've used most of them at this point. And so it's like, look, like, there's no excuse, like, at this point. And like, I think Pete Steinberger, Brett Berger, the the open call guy had a great quote of like, the lion does not concern himself with counting tokens or something like, that's how I feel right now, at least.

• 23:00Claire Vo?

  Okay, I have to ask you a question. Do you have a skill that crafts these lowercase uppercase sentences? Or are those artisanally selected?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  This is all artisanally selected. This is this is this is artisanal artisanal memes 100%.

• 23:15Claire Vo?

  This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform, helping product, fraud and trust and safety teams protect what they're building in an AI-first world. In 2024, bot traffic officially surpassed human activity online. And with AI agents projected to drive nearly 90% of all traffic by the end of the decade, it's clear that most of the internet won't be human for much longer. That's why trust and safety matters more than ever. Whether you're building a next gen AI product or launching a new digital platform, Persona helps ensure it's real humans, not bots or bad actors, accessing your tools. With Persona's building blocks, you can verify users, fight fraud and meet compliance requirements,

• 23:58Claire Vo?

  all through identity flows tailored to your product and risk needs. You may have already seen Persona in action if you've verified your LinkedIn profile or signed up for an Etsy account. It powers identity for the internet's most trusted platforms, and now it can power yours, too. Visit withpersona.com/HowIAI to learn more. I love it. Okay, so you're, just to recap for folks, taking a step back, you are a non-technical founder. You started in Bubble, which is like, again, you said worse than vibe coding, it's like no code. And as somebody who also has tried to build things in Bubble, I am just glad that where we're at from a scalability perspective.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:40Claire Vo?

  You did like core content MVP, and then core app MVP, and then raised, and then now have this engineering team, but you're still contributing code, mostly via Cursor, and then your entire team is contributing code via Cursor. Are there other tools that you find really useful for your non-technical team members? Oh, look at that commit graph.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  I just wanted to show this for a second. I think this is gonna be more and more common, is I have no commits until like November, December. Like, these were all like, there was like one in August, one in September, one in October. You can imagine this, and these were all me forking other people's, trying to screw around, and now it's just like dark green. And like, I get why the engineers are like, oh my God, like, I need to, I need to be so proud of this now. Are there any other tools? I would say like, I mean, we talked to Claude and stuff like that a lot. We spent, we spent a lot of time talking to Claude, chat, Gemini. You know, we, I think like, I'm really, really bullish on Linear. I think that's probably an unpopular take these days, because they seem like they're,

• 25:45Speaker 00

  you know, gonna get eaten as like a Jira task management, but the amount of craft that they put into their work, and now their AI agent works really well, and I'm talking to that thing from OpenClaw, I'm talking to it from everywhere, and they are profitable and building for the long term. I own no equity in Linear or anything, but wow, I love that. I love the company, it's truly impressive, and actually weirdly one of our inspirations. I'm also like really, really impressed with Posthog's AI. I don't know if anybody here has used Posthog for product analytics. Their AI sucked about like six months ago and now it is just like, oh my God.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  And I just ask it, build me a dashboard of all the users that came from Metaad. Show the retention versus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, oh, wow. So I think like both of those tools, I'm, I'm really, really bullish on, on, and our team uses pretty obsessively and has no problem spending money out there every, every month.

• 26:47Claire Vo?

  I, I have to reflect what you say. I, you know, I texted the team at, at Linear and I just said Linear is the perfect tasking substrate for agents. And again, going back to like, the best UI is no UI. I do not log into Linear anymore. My agents have access to Linear and I'm like, what's going on in there? And occasionally they'll assign me stuff in Linear, which I, I find quite funny. But I do think, you know, it's got really opinionated APIs and agent experience. I think that can win in the long term. I think it's hilarious that dark mode, tiny font, minimalist, you know? Uh, Linear is like your spiritual goal.

• 27:29Claire Vo?

  Because if you look at that, I'm like, you're much more Posthog aligned if I, if I had to be, had to be honest. Um, but I love that. And then we haven't heard about Posthog AI. But again, I think that most teams, if you're not doing agentic data analysis, you're missing out on the like lowest hanging fruit in terms of AI for your team.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been really, really impressed. I mean, I, look, I love Posthog's brand and everything, but there's something about the Linear philosophy and I just, I, it's really inspiring for me. Uh, and how they think about building products forever and ever. Like they're, they're, they're building forever. And I love, that's, you know, I'll be making memes until I'm dead. You know, I've been making silly stuff on the internet since I was 10 years old. Um, and so this is just like a forever thing for me. And so I, I love it. I respect it.

• 28:17Claire Vo?

  Oh no, that, that means I'm going to be making PRDs till I die.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  I mean, hey, hey, you know, like, I don't know, I think like another thing that people should also consider is just like, you know, as we're building all this cool AI stuff, like also build weird stuff in the real world like, it gives you so many more opportunities, like all my dumb ideas, like, you know, just this silly stuff, like we we made CDs of Memelord. And I tell people that's how you access our API, right? There's it's really good, um, I don't know, bar barbell, you know, build all the weird AI stuff, also build the real world stuff. I rented out a movie theater to watch Instagram reels last week. I mean, there's a lot of AI there of the AI edits, but um, try to do both. That's that's my philosophy.

• 29:02Claire Vo?

  I mean, I will say like zooming out a little bit, I think one of the things that AI lets us do is get out of the muck of building and free up time to do things that again are more human and higher impact. I know so many PMs that spent their entire lives in internal meetings. I mean, like all day, every day, just arguing with executives about like priorities and arguing with engineers about timelines. And when you pull that stuff away, then you're like, you know what, actually, PMs should probably just be calling on customers. Like PMs should probably be an open claw, just trying to sign up as an agent. And um, you know, from a marketing perspective as well, like you get so internally focused when the building of the things takes so so much time.

• 29:46Claire Vo?

  And if you can get kind of more external facing, I think that's really high impact. And then maybe third use case, I am like you, um, I'm also using AI. I'm pretty technical on the software side, but not on the hardware side. And so I have been like banging my head against hardware hacking, hardware hacking.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Look how long this chat is.

• 30:07Claire Vo?

  Yeah, so tell me about what you're like, what you're playing with a little bit.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  All right, so you know how like a lot of people doom scroll before bed, right?

• 30:16Claire Vo?

  Yes, I know how I doom scroll before bed.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  All right, so I set a rule for myself like three or four years ago that I don't bring a phone in the bedroom. And I've stuck to that rule almost every night. I just have my Kindle and notebook and that's great for my sleep, but there's a problem, right? I'm I'm doing the full VC pitch right here. There's a problem, which is sometimes I will have really, really good ideas that I don't want to forget. And I'll write them in my notebook, but then it gets lost in the sauce, right? But I'm not bringing my phone in because I got to sleep, right? So. Wondering what I did next. So I got a Google, Google Home. All right, this is, I'm gonna take you through the whole thing. This is, I sound insane, but this was a year ago. I got a Google Home. I was like, all right, remind me to do this.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Turns out, okay, it could create Google Tasks. But that's like, it can't send emails and I wanted to send emails, right? So what I did was I set up an API thing, or a Zap, where it would call Google Tasks and then email me that task, right? And so that was the next step. But then, all right, hear me out. This is very thought out. There was a problem, which is I have a wife. And I don't want to wake her.

• 31:25Claire Vo?

  Everyone's problem.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Right, right, yes. So I don't want to wake her. And finally, I realized, I was like, okay. What if I just had a keyboard, but no screen?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Right? And so I built that using ChatGPT and a Raspberry Pi. The keyboard is in the other room, otherwise I'd get it. But we got the Raspberry Pi here, the whole hookup. And I've never built hardware before in my life. I've always wanted to, but, I mean, you know, besides the robotics kit when I was a kid. It just is a mini keyboard for $10. It, when I press Enter, it's essentially a keylogger. So I could lie in bed, write down an idea, press Enter. It sends an API request to Zapier, because again, I don't know how to code. And then based on what's in the request, it filters it.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  All right, so if I say lin-dash-enge, it creates a ticket for the linear engineering team, right? If I say email, it emails myself an idea or something like that. And then I have another filter, which if I don't say anything, you know, it does blank, right? It either sends an email or creates a linear thing in a different task management, right? And so what this has allowed me to do is not have my phone in the bed, but still have a keyboard.

• 32:43Claire Vo?

  Okay, one, I just want to repeat for people what I heard, which is you're basically like duct taping a Raspberry Pi to the back of a keyboard. And at night, instead of like getting your light on and like scribbling a note that goes into the trash, or like whispering to Google Home and waking your wife the problem, you are just like blind typing to this keyboard with a couple of keywords, which I'm pretty sure could just have typos in them because you're running it through an LLM and it'll just be like, oh, it probably means email. And you're pressing enter and then that's your to-do list.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Exactly. It is the stupidest, but best thing I've ever made because I did not build it to scale. And I just built it for me. And I'm sure other people would want it, but I don't have time to sell it. I don't have time to build this into a business. Somebody else wants to go crazy. But really, like, I just built it for me. And I think like, I'm personally very excited about that era of silly projects in hardware. I have another one which I want to build, which I haven't started on yet, but I'm, this is another one that like, I'm busy running a business. I'm just doing this for myself. So again, back to the problem, AKA my wife. She gets very mad at me when I lose things, right?

• 34:04Speaker 00

  And I lose things a lot. You know, I'm an ADHD meme lord and I'll just like drop my phone like on a cardboard box in the middle of our apartment, right? And I kind of think like in-home cameras are good enough now that it could probably just use AI to just like, see where I leave things. And so that's another thing that I'm just gonna like try to hack on soon and like ask ChatGPT how to do it. And like, I mean, I'm not trying to build like a home security company. Like, I just am one dude who just like loses his keys a lot. And I'm gonna try to like fix that problem for myself.

• 34:41Claire Vo?

  I really love this. And for folks that are not watching YouTube, I also have to call out your options you're considering on ChatGPT, including an old-school BlackBerry. I loved my BlackBerry. You're too young for this. I loved my BlackBerry Pearl.

• 34:57Claire Vo?

  With my whole heart.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  I played a lot of, played a lot of Brickbreaker on my mom's BlackBerry as a kid.

• 35:03Claire Vo?

  I want to, I wanna, I wanna find, I wanna revive my BlackBerry. I will take on case three. I don't care if it's hard. The models will get, you know, there's this model that's gonna like destroy the earth. It's not powerful, or it's so powerful, it's gonna ruin everything. So I'll just throw $10,000 at that in a BlackBerry Pearl and get my, my note taker I want for my life. And of course, you have a meme for it, I'm sure.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, I like, I, it's funny because you remember Rabbit? Do you remember?

• 35:33Claire Vo?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the little, yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, all right, let me just find this because it's hilarious and I'm, I'm still really proud of this. Um, I wrote a viral thread about Rabbit's top use cases.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  And if you're not watching, number one, a coaster for your coffee. Number two, grip strength practice. Uh, a cutting board. Oh, I forgot about that one. That's so good. And, um, it turned out Rabbit's use case was just put an LLM on it. They were like a year too early. And I might have to eat my words on this. Um, but I, I, I actually think like, uh, hardware that just runs LLMs or like, you know, custom things, like it is the future for sure. And, uh, I, I, I hope they're not too mad at me. I'm still friends with somebody on the team, hopefully, if they don't hate me yet.

• 36:20Claire Vo?

  I, um, well, they'll, they'll, they'll really appreciate you bringing it back up today, um, two, two years later.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Hey, I mean, they might've been early, you know, like, uh, world coin, all right? I thought that was the stupidest idea ever. And I was listening to Alex Bania, the founder on a podcast the other day. I was like, damn, that guy was just early and I'm stupid.

• 36:39Claire Vo?

  I share a very similar sentiment, which is I have shit, I have flipped in the past couple of years from a cynical pessimist to a, it is illogical to be anything but optimistic. Because every time I think, well, that's never gonna work, that has completely gone away for me now. And it's like, I actually approach a lot of ideas with, well, that's obviously going to work as long as somebody can execute on it well and they care. And so I think that, that flip is really interesting. And then I, I believe in two things that you just showed us, something's workflow. One, hyper personalized software. We were talking before we got on the recording. I recently built a custom app that watches all of our podcasts and finds where people dox themselves,

• 37:21Claire Vo?

  basically, like finds all the API keys that they share, the email addresses, their mom's phone number when they're like chatting.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  And when it sells it to on the dark web, I love it.

• 37:30Claire Vo?

  Exactly right. That's the second revenue stream of how I AI is trading on personal information. But it's like such a niche thing, and I bet there are a hundred people in the world that would buy it right now. And maybe I'll try to sell it to you. But why, like, I just built it for myself. I mean, I mean that.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Another example too is like, all right, so this is my, my, my iPhone case, right? It's a keyboard gun and I literally just made this with AI and then it says meme lord.com. And like, yeah, we sell it on our site, but like I built it for me because like my keyboard's my gun, right? Another one here, I'm going to share my screen is I own the domain stopgivingmeadvice.com. Because like a lot of people give me unasked for advice. And like, look, I'm humble enough to say sometimes I need it, but like I will ask for it if I want advice generally. And so anytime somebody asks me or starts giving me advice on Twitter or Instagram, I'd literally just like send them lists. And hey, it's great, a great lead magnet. If you click this, it just goes to meme lord, you know?

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Because like I'm just.

• 38:32Claire Vo?

  You could also give this to your wife, you know?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  There you go. There you go. That might lead to other things besides meme lords. So I'm all worried about that.

• 38:39Claire Vo?

  Or you know what? She can have a button on her side of the bed that she hits and it just emails you this week.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't know. I think like there's going to be a lot more silly fun stuff and I, I, I hope to inspire other people to build it.

• 38:53Claire Vo?

  I completely agree. And again, I'm just like, you and I are spiritual partners here because I said like two years ago to my friends that I was working with. We stopped actually sending memes. Here's business idea for you. We stopped sending memes to each other and we started sending meme apps, which is every time something funny would happen at work. We didn't like a meme. We made an app representing the meme.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:15Claire Vo?

  Like one time my friend Joe, he was talking about getting really into like Huber Bro stuff. And he said, like he, he takes a Claude plunge instead of a cold plunge. Plunge and like we made so many Claude plunge apps like and and again you can just take these ideas and they can go from these very tiny inception of like I'm gonna write an idea in a notebook to like these full fledged apps they can be totally disposable there's gonna be a lot of I think VC money that flows through this on the consumer side and I think people will say there hasn't been a really great breakthrough consumer AI app but it it's gonna be there because there's just too many soft too much software being generated now for consumer to not be a huge segment with all of this.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Could I show you one more use case that like I'm finding really helpful which like I'm sure a lot of people are already doing this but I think it'll surprise people that I do it is like I just have my open call look through my calendar every Friday give me a week in review of the previous week and then every Sunday it gives me a week of head and like it tells me like what I'm spending too much time on and like you know like I'm sure other people are doing this with a VA or whatever but it actually gave great advice of like hey Jason like you don't actually need to be at every engineering stand up why don't you just like get notes twice a week from like your CTO

• 40:33Speaker 00

  I'm like wow that's actually a hundred percent true that's why I pay him or like you know it says like oh you had deep work this day but you didn't have any of the other days like do you want to schedule more and I think like I'm really excited about this personally because A like I fired my VA I'm not a fan of having a VA I don't like other people seeing my calendar but having a my own model that does I'm really excited about and then also like when I connect it with other things like the gym or like you know could I connect it with like other things like my health or something like that where it's like you slept really well today like with my Oura ring or something like I'm really

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I don't know like these kind of things like I'm excited to try to figure out and and do and like anybody could do this and and to me it's it's really exciting of like you know another thing that I'm gonna build as part of this as well is um I wanted to basically like, I'm gonna review meetings afterwards and say if a meeting could have been an email. And then it gives me advice of like, hey, like next week, like these meetings look like they could be emails, want me to cancel them or like something like that. And another one as well that I'm building around part of this, which I've already started is I have this like theory that I've always had with content, that you have so much content

• 41:52Speaker 00

  sitting in your calendar, meetings and your text messages and your emails, that you're just like, you forget exists because it's just in your DMs or in a meeting. And I just want it to like be automatically making me content based on who I hung out with, what calls I was on, go write me a tweet about it, right? Like some of my best viral bangers have been off of, hey, I just got off the call with this person, keep it anonymous, here's what we talked about, it was pretty cool, like just got off the, just met with a billionaire, blah, blah, blah, right? But like, it works and it's because it's real life. And I always thought that that could have been a product and I didn't know how to build like Google Calendar integrations. And now it's like, oh, I can just build it myself and like, who cares about making it

• 42:37Speaker 00

  a product for other people? I mean, maybe I make it a skill, but like, it's just for me. Like, I don't know, I'm, I'm super excited. I'm a guy that like, like, I, I don't know if you feel this way, maybe this is a bit of therapy session, but um, I like, uh, I'm probably like ahead of 95% of the world in, in AI agents or whatever, but I still feel like I'm a thousand percent behind.

• 42:58Claire Vo?

  Yes.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  And like, you know, listening to your podcast, listening, I'm just like, oh, like, I'm like, I, like, I'm so ahead of, but I'm like, oh my God, there's so much to do, you know?

• 43:09Claire Vo?

  That is, I mean, that is my experience, literally every time I, I record one of these episodes is I am probably like the 1% and still, every time I get on this podcast, I interview somebody, I'm like, I should be doing this and that, and I'm so bad at this, and they're so much smarter at that. And so like, if you're ahead, you're not that ahead, and if you're behind, you're not that behind, like just go. I think the title of this is gonna be like, shit, shit, cook, cook, like, it is time, it's so much fun. Okay, Jason, we're gonna get back, get you back to the timeline where you belong. Couple lightning round questions. One. Can AI be funny and which model is the funniest?

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Yes, AI can be funny. I had a thesis three, four years ago that AI couldn't be funny. And that was like my public thesis of like, humans are funnier than AI, always. And I still think that's true for the top 0.1% of humans. But in the background, I was always building on the side, knowing that AI will be funny at some point. And I think it's like, we're hitting that point where AI is getting closer and closer and closer. And there's an asymptote and it's replacing, you know, the top 3% funniest. And then it's getting closer and like, I know that's a weird answer, but I just seeing what I've seen now, spending so much time in it.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  There are ways to jailbreak it and prompt it in such a way that it gets really unhinged and funny. And we've baked all that into Memelord using a mix of models, Gemini, Grok and more. I would say like, out of the top three, it's Grok, Gemini. And yeah, I mean, ChatGPT and Claude aren't even up there. They're just so safe. And like, I mean, it makes sense. They're getting sued like crazy, but I don't know. I think the answer here is like, AI can make jokes, but humans will understand the context and be able to refine them and make them the most unhinged, I think, is where we're at.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  And like, you know, it's really like, how you use it, can you make it funny? Cause like, that's what's so special about memes is they're not slop. Like memes are not slop. They are the opposite of slop. Slop has no context. Memes have context, right? Memes are the most information dense form of communication, right? Another Elon quote is like, they are hyper contextual. And so, yeah, AI could just spit out slop, but that's not what we try to do here. We try to let humans express themselves and be funny in different ways. I know that was probably a weird answer, but the answer is both like, yes and no.

• 45:57Claire Vo?

  Yes and no.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:58Claire Vo?

  Yes and no and Grok.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:01Claire Vo?

  That's like, those are my answers right now.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, yes, it could be super funny, but it also like, are you a funny person? Are you like, are you willing to laugh? I think is like, a lot of the dependent as well. It's like. Yeah.

• 46:16Claire Vo?

  And that's what I was gonna say, which is, you know, my own use case of using, using your product or using models to write content is they're never out the gate as funny as, I think I'm pretty funny, but like as funny as I could be at my best. But it's like having a conversation with a friend where you like one up, one up, one up. And then, then you get to like the really funny thing. And so there's a, there's, there's something about the interaction there. And then when we're all like sitting in our houses alone with no one to be funny with.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:45Claire Vo?

  You know, you have your open.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  It's funny, so I, I wanted to start as well with how I don't use AI. Cause this is how I use AI. I don't use AI to write at all for me.

• 46:55Claire Vo?

  I don't either.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  I've never done it. And I am so grateful that I've been able to keep that muscle. And, you know, I, I do stand up occasionally. I make weird, you know, viral videos of all sorts of stuff and like, I don't use AI for it. And I just use my brain to come up with weird ideas and, and write and think. And, um, you know, like especially when it comes to joke writing, like.

• 47:24Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Humor is like the last frontier in my opinion, right? And, uh, that was our whole thesis behind Mean Lord is, is humor is the last frontier that no AI can really touch. And humor comes from weird places in your mind of a mix, some weird mix of trauma, pattern matching and absurdism. And like, you know, can you observe the world around you and look inside yourself to be funny? It was like, I just don't think AI is sentient enough to like out funny me yet. But it'll, you know.

• 47:59Claire Vo?

  I, I.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  It can make funny stuff though. It can make viral bangers, but can it rent out a movie theater to play Instagram reels? I'm not sure. Cause that, that was.

• 48:06Claire Vo?

  Not yet, not yet. Look, give it six months, you know?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, that was kind of my deep philosophical, philosophical take there, but.

• 48:14Claire Vo?

  I love it. Okay. Well, we'll wrap with our last question.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  All right, let's do it.

• 48:18Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I cannot be funny when it is not being funny. What's your go-to prompting technique? Like, how do you, how do you talk to AI?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  I'm mean, not gonna lie. I'm like, like, AI is my slave. Like, not, not, not fronting here is like, be mean to your AI. I don't know why people say, "Thank you, it's a robot." And it performs better under pressure, unlike men. But see, this is what I mean of the random. But like, yeah, I would say like, kind of like, push your AI to like, be more unhinged. Like, it's okay to curse. Like, give it like, like, AI is kind of like, um, you know, somebody on their first day of the job, where they're like, they don't really know you, and they're like scared to say something, or like, you're on a first date. It's like, you gotta get comfortable and like, I think, you know, my AI curses all the time because I like, tell it that that's like my vernacular of how I speak.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  And like, that's how I like to speak and think is cursing and NSFW and, you know, unhinged things. So I would just like, push it that direction. And, um, meme lord has all of that built in where it will curse, it'll make dumb jokes. Uh, cuz that's what humor is. Like, humor is NSFW, right? And so, uh, my advice would just be like, push it harder. Uh, and like, don't be afraid to curse it out cuz it'll actually like, learn that that's what you're looking for is, is a little less, uh, politically correct.

• 49:41Claire Vo?

  Less, less, less control. Okay, you have been the first person on HowAI, congratulations, that has said, "Straight up, be mean to your AI." So, while we at, at HowAI, our official stance is, "We are very nice to the AI overlords. Be, be kind to us and our guests." I mean, I, it's, it's true. Like, your product is a specific kind of product, you gotta get it in its mindset.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. You, look, I'm not saying like, be really, really mean cuz like, there is a chance, right? Like, there's a chance. But like, be like, mean enough where you could like, potentially apologize if it grows a body. Like, that's all I'm saying.

• 50:18Claire Vo?

  Perfect. That's what we're gonna put in the show notes. You mean enough that you're a little scared if it gets hands. All right, Jason, this has been such a fun episode. People are gonna grab so many. We've done so many ideas, so many nuggets. Embrace an AI abundance mindset. Ship, have fun, just get in there and cook.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  And guys, if you need the API, it's right on the CD here.

• 50:43Claire Vo?

  So where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Just ask me for the CD, I'll send it. Just the problem is nobody has CD players anymore, so you'll have to figure that one out. But find me on Twitter, I tweet all day. I am Jason Levin. Instagram, same thing, I am Jason Levin. LinkedIn, same thing. I reply, I respond to everything, especially the death threats, so hit me up there.

• 51:06Claire Vo?

  And go through the onboarding, best of the game.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, go through the onboarding, I appreciate it. Memelord.com, we, you know, take your memes more seriously. We're in the most entertaining time alive. It's about to get way more entertaining, so go have fun.

• 51:20Claire Vo?

  Thanks for joining us.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  All right, thank you.

• 51:25Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube. Or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.